The evolution of contact centers in this past decade had been incredibly remarkable, it’s important for the business to understand the latest trends and be updated of trends in technology, the Benchmarking Report provides a vitally important reference point. It helps organizations gain insight into future trends, the ways in which their customers are likely to behave, and the performance levels they need to attain or aspire to.

Factors that are driving the Benchmarking Report

1. The clients are using lots of other channels outside of voice to engage with an organization. Customers opt for voice as the last option, if all the other modes like SMS, web chat and Email fails.

2.Mobility is unifying all communications, people are using mobiles because of its easy to communicate provision to all channels. It has become that one device for communication where you have the perks to do anything and everything.

3. Most of the customers are looking for a seamless experience, customers expect the organization to have the records of the history of their previous communication, this way the organization can refer to the customer much better.

4. A thorough analysis is required to bridge the communication issue between the organization and the customer. The analytics are becoming critical because the number of channels and interaction with them are increasing significantly.

On the basis of a fore said trends we have some recommendations for the contact center community through the benchmarking report.

• Contact centers have to go digital or they will die

Contact centers have to go digital or they will die, there is a reason when we say this, a survey on voice v/s non voice reveals that the non voice components are going to overtake the voice components, in the next two years. We are reaching an era where the organization would be dominated by the non voice channels. If the contact center is not prepared to handle this change, IT WILL EXTINCT. An interesting fact about this generation, is that voice is the fifth choice of reaching an organization. The Gen-X people who are above 50, for them voice is the fifth choice. Same goes for the Gen-Y people, who in countries like India are the largest segments. There are contact centers globally, that have built their infrastructure predominantly poised, aligning to suit the preferences of Gen-X and Gen-Y.

• Analytics is the key

The second area that is equally important is analytics. Contact centers today are not geared to provide multi channel services and are not geared to do Data Analysis, in fact, 40% of the contact centers don’t do analysis. Right investments are imminent to do data analysis and to offer personalized service.

• IT dependency will increase significantly

The third part is integrating these channels together so you have a uniform view. It again means everything has to do with IT, so there are quite a few challenges.

Operational growth for contact centers will come from non voice

Rather than looking at a call center as a mechanism to reduce the cost of the firm it should be viewed as an important arena that helps in improving growth of the company. It’s not enough to just have contact centers or customer experience centers or interaction centers set up with different channels, it doesn’t end with just offering them different channels to reach an organization. For instance through fax, E-mail, phone web chat tor social media but it’s important that the contact centers delivers the client experience it promises across all these channels. It’s important to understand the areas where improvement can be made, earlier it was only voice so it was easy to measure the customer experience, but now after adding 6 or 7 more channels of communication to improve the performance, its mandatory to measure the client experience.

Paradigm shift of the contact centers in the Indian market

This market is set to change dramatically, we know India is a quite sophisticated market and customer market is very connected, they are not willing to put up with bad service. Contact centers will change for the better and the market will grow. Companies are starting to consolidate and standardizing infrastructure, with multiple contact centers it’s using resources to provide a consistent experience across all channels. A new yet definite change has started. The extended enterprise, together with contact centers will see significant investment in India because of it being the back end hub for many companies. There will be huge opportunity together with huge pressure to align with what customers are demanding.